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Regardless of the impact of climate change, there is a widening gap between water supplies and needs. In fact, a new report from the international consulting group McKinsey & Co. estimates that by 2030, India alone will have only 50% of the water that it needs under a business-as-usual scenario. Nor is Asia the only region that will grapple with water scarcity in a warmer world: the McKinsey report estimates that the globe will have 40% less water than it needs by 2030 if nothing is done to change current consumption patterns. "The countries where water is already scarce are going to be the ones really vulnerable to climate change," says Colin Chartres, director general of the IWMI.

That makes the security of the Himalayan glaciers all the more important for the region and their potential loss all the more threatening. While it's difficult to get a comprehensive assessment of the tens of thousands of glaciers in the Himalayas — all above 10,000 ft. — independent scientific studies indicate that the third pole is melting fast, probably because of warming temperatures brought on by climate change. Since 1960, almost a fifth of the Indian Himalayas' ice coverage has disappeared, and the 2007 global-warming assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change judged that glaciers in the Himalayas were "receding faster than at any other place in the world." If global warming goes unchecked, the Himalayan melt will certainly get worse. This year Chinese researchers projected a 43% decrease in glaciated area by 2070. If that happens, the impact could be catastrophic. Losing Himalayan meltwater would only stress the remaining resources further. High-mountain states like Nepal and Bhutan could suffer flash floods as glacial lakes gave way under the rush of accelerated melting. And since the rivers of the Himalayas are shared by nuclear powers that have engaged in violent conflict over the past half-century — India, Pakistan and China — the threat of a war over water can't be denied. "The warming of the past 20 years is getting more and more intense," says Yao Tandong, head of China's Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research. "If warming continues, [the impact] will be even more serious."

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This is one of the many fallacies of "global warm," er, "climate change."

(Remember...until a few years ago, the earth was set at 72 degrees, 88 degrees, or 20 degrees, depending on your latitude. It wasn't until evil capitalism, evil Americans, and non-Priuses arrived that this changed.)

Will wars be fought over water? That might be in the realm of possibility.

Will that have anything to do with global warm, er, climate change? No way.

But hey, CTB, keep on with the fairy tales, if it makes you feel better.

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No, there will be no need for wars in the future. We will all get along and rise to the occasion. Those down stream will gladly lay down their lives so that those upstream can live. The Obama will see to the needs of families left behind and destitute so that those giving their lives for world peace can go to Nervana knowing that they have done right and that they will be in a better place surrounded by ........... Oh that will be the day:thumbsup:

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If the Ganges, the Yellow River, the Yangtze, etc. dries up there will be a huge number of people without water, industry without water. It will be a very bad situation for millions upon millions of people.

When the ice thaws and the snow melts every spring, the glaciers birth the great rivers of the region, the mightiest river system in the world: the Ganges, the Indus, the Brahmaputra, the Mekong, the Yellow, the Yangtze. Together, these rivers give material and spiritual sustenance to 3 billion people, nearly half of the world's population — and all are nursed by Himalayan ice. Monsoons come and go, filling the rivers at times and then leaving them lethargic, but the ice melt has always been regular and dependable in a region where water — or the lack of it — defines civilization. "This isn't like the polar ice caps," says Shubash Lohani, an officer with the Nepal program of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). "You have a huge population downstream from the Himalayas who are depend on it.

It's a population that is stressed for water, even if the ice doesn't disappear. According to the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), most of South Asia is already in a state of water scarcity, as is much of China. At the same time, the population in this part of the world is set to expand, even as economic growth increases competition for water used in agriculture and industry.

When I worked in China in 1995 several villages near Xi'an, where I worked, ran out of water. It was only about two days later that near warfare broke out between the villages over the small amount of water that was still available. This did not make the national or international news. As the Chinese say, "You do not put your dirty linen out for all to see." The only reason I heard about this was from a friend who grew up near these villages and still had family and friends in that area. Xi'an is in Shaanxi Province and borders the Gobi Desert. Thus it is quite dry. The flow of water in the Yellow River, even at that time, was markedly less than previously. This was partly due to less rain and also by more use by industry.

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So perhaps you made an overstatement by saying, "The big wars of the 21st century will most likely be over water".

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, "Many local disputes..."

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My prediction is that when whole countries, like India and China, start running out of water then the probability of big wars will be very great. Only time will tell. India and China are already having problems.

During the summer of 1998 the no water from the Yellow River reached the sea for 250 days. In 18 of the last 26 years the Yellow River has run dry further and further upstream from the Bohai Sea.

The Yellow River has changed dramatically over the past decades. The average volume of river water flowing to the sea has decreased by 75 percent since the 1950s.

In the 1990s, 70 percent of the river water was being used -- a figure 30 percent higher than the international standard.

The average volume of water in the Yellow River has dropped to only 58 billion cubic meters a year affecting the 10,100 reservoirs in its drainage area of 72 billion cubic meters.

The water shortage in the Yellow River has also affected the social and economic development of the villages, towns, industries and people that depend on it.

The hydropower stations in both Northwest China's Gansu and Qinghai provinces have reduced their electricity production dramatically. Farmers are also thirsty for water.

And the water shortage will worsen the phenomenon known as the "hanging river." The river bed in the lower reaches of the Yellow River is now higher than the surrounding fields.

Early this year, a substantial amount of sediment contributed to the silting of the river channel, significantly raising the river bed and creating a second "hanging river" on top of the first.

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Well-Known Member

What identifiable water source is there that may become a future source of conflict between India and China?

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The source of several major rivers in India, China and Vietnam rise in the Himalayas. As the glaciers disappear there will be tension over who controls the water at the source and how it will be distributed.

How do you believe China would react if India began channeling glacier melt runoff away from the Yellow River to the Ganges ... or the other way around?

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Active Member

The bottom line is it does not matter if the shortage is man made or by nature ... here it is obviously caused by a great degree by man ... when people run out of water they become nasty very quickly.

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No.

It matters a great deal.

The anti-American, anti-freedom, personal property-destroying initiatives known as "climate change legislation" or "c(r)ap and trade (better described as "crap and tax"), is enacted upon the premise that man is completely the cause for this "dilemma."

It's one thing to drain a lake. It's another to completely alter the earth's climate. But freedom-haters (a group that you seem to sympathize with) will take a local issue, and attempt to destroy a great nation with it.

Fortunately, it appears intelligent, freedom-loving people are waking up to this travesty of liberty and justice. Maybe, if we're fortunate, this will fall flat and embarass the likes of the one of the greatest swindlers, and idiots, of our generation, Owl Gore.

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New Member

The source of several major rivers in India, China and Vietnam rise in the Himalayas. As the glaciers disappear there will be tension over who controls the water at the source and how it will be distributed.

How do you believe China would react if India began channeling glacier melt runoff away from the Yellow River to the Ganges ... or the other way around?

Click to expand...

The water is controlled by the country containing the source and rivers flowing from the source.

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Well-Known Member

There is an increase in melt in lower elevation glaciers and the hazards of moraine damned lakes are real, but I believe that the rate of retreat of the glaciers has been exaggerated’ he told us later at a press conference. When I asked him about the Indus Basin, he replied that he would like to do a conclusive study on the Indus Basin soon, but he believed that the glaciers there are quite healthy.

Of course Professor Armstrong has not exactly gone up to the glaciers in these mountains to do the study — the research was done mostly by satellite imagery provided by NASA and other information. ‘There can be a large margin of error when doing remote sensing’, explained the Director General of the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD based in Kathmandu) when I turned to him for further clarification. ‘The problem is that there is a lack of information and the higher up we go, the less we have. No research is done regularly on this region’.

Another scientist who does agree with Raina’s report is Kenneth Hewitt, a geo-scientist at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada, who recently returned from an expedition to K2. He observed five glacier advances and a single retreat in the Karakorams. Such evidence certainly challenges the view that the glaciers in the region are disappearing fast.

I got the chance to talk to Ken Hewitt a few days before he left for Skardu in September. ‘Nowhere in the upper Indus Basin do you have the collapse of glaciers like in Nepal and the Alps’, he told me. ‘They are actually holding their own or growing. They could well be growing because of climate change. The summer weather is cloudier and there is more snowfall’. Hewitt pointed out that this may be a temporary phenomenon and that there was a serious need to look closely at what is happening and that more glaciers needed to be tracked. Wapda, he says, is starting to operate field stations again to monitor the glaciers.

Growing glaciers, however, are not exactly good news. According to Hewitt, ‘Surging glaciers are dangerous because they store water. The Hunza River has declined by 20 per cent due to the advance of glaciers in the area. These glaciers are storing ice… This is a different problem and needs to be investigated’.

What emerges from talking to all these scientists is that the glaciers in the region are certainly changing due to climate change, but in what way, we just don’t know for sure. In the meantime, ICIMOD would like to see the Himalayan countries get together on one platform to combine their research and give a clear message to the rest of the world during the UN’s Climate Change Summit to be held in Copenhagen this December.

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According to a flurry of recent reports by the BBC and other mass media, the glaciers in the Himalayan mountains are melting at a furious pace. Of course this is taken as proof that climate change is still taking place at an ever accelerating rate, despite the fact the global temperatures have remained flat for the past decade. What, then, explains the rapidly retreating Himalayan glaciers? Nothing, because the glaciers are not shrinking. A new report by a senior Indian glaciologist states that the glaciers remain frozen and quite intact, thank you.

The report by Vijay Kumar Raina, formerly of the Geological Survey of India, seeks to correct widely spread reports that India's 10,000 or so Himalayan glaciers are shrinking rapidly in response to climate change. It's not true, Raina says. The rumors may have originated in the Asia chapter of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC's) 2007 Working Group II report, which claims that Himalayan glaciers “are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.” Evidently, the bogus reporting was based on measurements from only a handful of glaciers.

Raina's report draws on published studies and unpublished findings from half a dozen Indian groups who have analyzed remote-sensing satellite data or conducted on-site surveys at remote locations often higher than 5000 meters. While the report surveyed of a number of glaciers, two particularly iconic ones stand out. The first is the 30-kilometer-long Gangotri glacier, source of the Ganges River. Between 1934 and 2003, the glacier retreated an average of 70 feet (22 meters) a year and shed a total of 5% of its length. But in 2004 and 2005, the retreat slowed to about 12 meters a year, and since September 2007 Gangotri has been “practically at a standstill,” according to Raina's report. \

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